Christopher Rice - The Vines

“They’re coming, Blake,” she says. “There were others. He’s been calling them all night. They’re coming.”

“Why?”

“Because I told them if they didn’t, I would send the tape to every news station in the country.”

“You have the tape?” Blake asks.

“What does it matter?”

Blake sees it first, and when Caitlin sees the sight register in his eyes, she turns to see Nova holding her own gun on her. Her stance seems surprisingly steady, but it could be a trick of the shadows.

“Get away from him,” Nova growls.

“That’s not smart, Nova. Injure me and they’ll simply go for the wound. Then they’ll go after you for betray—”

“Shut up! You have no idea what this is!” Nova shouts back. “And you have no right to force it onto someone else, not this way. Not like this.”

“I’m not forcing it on anyone. Grown-ups don’t blame other people for the truth , Nova.”

“You never lived the truth your whole life, you spoiled, crazy bitch. You’re nothing but privilege and lies. Something finally wakes you up after being so goddamn blind for so long, and now you think you have the right to drag someone else into your darkness? No way in hell! Get away from him. Or I will shoot you. I swear to God .”

“Yeah. Whatever.” Caitlin turns away from this blast of hatred as if it were a puff of air. “We don’t have time for this, Blake.”

“No,” Blake says.

Maybe she expected him to whisper his refusal as if it were a shameful confession and she’s startled by his bluntness, because Caitlin stares at him, the pruning shears open in her right hand. “No?” she asks. “No, you won’t make a—”

“No, I won’t do it. I—” Just thinking through his next words has steadied his heart, but before he can give voice to them he feels a white-hot strip of pain across his chest, and only then does he realize Caitlin has slashed him through his polo shirt from his left shoulder to his right hip. Nova screams.

And then he hears the slick sound of sudden movement behind him, and Caitlin is backing away from him, arms spread, the bloody shears in her right hand. Her expression is sympathetic, and she is shaking her head back and forth as if Blake’s refusal to accept her gift is as despair-inducing as a battered wife’s refusal to file a police report against her husband.

When the smell hits him, he spins, one hand flying to the dripping wound in his chest. There are four of them. They have risen from the pit, and now they stand erect, snakelike, like cobras without hoods. The obscenely large blossoms have opened and are angled at Blake. And the smell coming from them is impossible: smoke, fire—and something else. The overpowering musk of unchecked body odor, so strong and pungent it seems to come from an era without deodorant or soap or any other modern cosmetics.

Blake’s eyes water, and when he opens his mouth to scream— Shoot it, Nova. Just shoot the damn thing! —he can taste the smell in the back of his throat, and when he blinks, he finds himself staring into darkness.

…They have not come. The men, Felix promised her. The extra bodies that would make the backbreaking work of this prison more bearable for them all. She has waited for the wagons to bring them, waited to hear the horse hooves pounding the front drive and the soft muffled cries of new arrivals with faces as black as her own. But even though she had given him precisely the bounty he asked for, there are no new slaves. No greater and more compassionate division of labor.

She has used her power to give them two growing seasons in one—twice the amount of cane and twice the amount of money Spring House has borne every year since its creation. But there has been no trade as Felix promised.

Before her rage can turn to despair, she waits for Spring House to sleep, then she walks barefoot from the slave quarters so as to make no noise. When she reaches the edge of the field, the vast and verdant field she grew with her own magic, she lays her hands against the nearest stalk and gives the ghosts in the soil a single command.

Die…

There is a crackling like that of fire, but it is the skin of the cane stalks giving way as the life is sucked from each one by the earth itself. And within seconds, they are tumbling into one another like towers built on swamp. And as they fall like shadowy, rustling dominoes, Blake can see past them to where Mike Simmons floats in a halo of fiery orange, eyes wide, gagged, and bound to a chair, his very presence beyond the field a portal between the present and the past. An invitation to unleash a similar rage as the one Virginie Lacroix released into the cane fields on which Felix Delachaise and Spring House drew all sustenance.

NO!

“No!” Blake screams.

He is staring down at the clover of leaves that have opened at the tip of a new tendril—a hand extended in greeting. Not just greeting. Invitation.

He does not give his hand in return; instead he takes a step backward, beholding the impossible being before him—its glowing blossoms and its slick green stalks—and utters the only words he can manage: “Fuck off.”

When the gunfire breaks out, he assumes Nova has shot at the monstrous growths before him. But the sound comes from the wrong direction, and when he turns to look, he feels a terrible pressure against his chest—he looks down and realizes the vine has taken him despite his refusal. It’s wrapped around the wound Caitlin slashed in him with punitive, angry speed.

Blake pitches forward, unsure whether he’s lost his balance or if the vines themselves are dragging him into the pit. By the time he hits the bottom and other coils of vine lurch beneath his sudden weight, he realizes it doesn’t matter; the vine wrapped around his chest has begun to drink.

Nova is vaguely aware that she’s holding her hands up in the air on either side of her head as she runs in a crouch. But it isn’t until she lands knees-first on the floor of the back porch that her spirit seems to crash back into her body. She spins until she’s got protection from the wall behind her. Her ears are ringing from the gunfire, and when she dares a peek around the edge of the doorway, she sees no sign of Caitlin, just the brightly lit gazebo and the sea of darkness beyond.

No sound comes from the lair of the vines. If the gunfire has frightened Blake into silence, it’s a good sign, a sign he isn’t being torn apart or injured. But he’s out there, alone. From what she saw of it, the pit isn’t big enough to hide in; there’s nowhere for Blake to crawl in either direction.

When the shooting started, she thought she’d fired the gun by mistake, but the muzzle flares from the far side of the garden made it clear in an instant the property had been invaded. Now, if whoever did the shooting comes forth out of the shadows, Blake will be exposed. And maybe his silence isn’t a good sign at all, maybe those things ate him. Because Caitlin Chaisson has no idea what she’s truly unleashed out here.

She dropped the gun. The gunfire was so loud, so fierce and sudden, it felt as if the bullets were piercing her, even though they weren’t. She’s never been around gunfire in her life. Has never handled a gun for longer than a few seconds when she was a little girl and her father exploded into the room in a panic and tore it from her hands. If I wanted my baby to grow up around guns, I would have raised her in New Orleans! That was her father’s mantra, and now it’s left her defenseless. But none of that matters. Because she just dropped Caitlin’s gun like some stupid white girl in a movie she and her friends would jeer at from the third row.